8.8.14

Serial Cut Cuts it up for Oreo Mini

Serial Cut is mainly known as a CGI studio because their final images push the limits of what is tangibly possible in the real world. Every job from Ikea to Nike combines CGI and practical photography into surreal worlds and situations that provoke emotional responses. Their Christmas campaign for Ikea last year featured floating islands of gifts, insanely balanced flatware, and curvaceous Christmas Trees. Their “Cabinet of Curiosities” featured an impossible Rube Goldberg machine with fake hands and ampersand tubes fighting against gravity. Both of these projects were rooted in photography, with elements added later to edge them into the limits of the imagination.

Their latest project, this time with Oreo Mini through The Martin Agency, was slightly different. The advertisements they created for the newest version of the iconic cookie were almost entirely practical. Although they look like they could be illustrations, they’re actually photographs of paper craft construction. They’re almost 100% cut paper that has been sculpted into three-dimensional representations. The CGI? The signature texture on the tiny Oreos. They drew them on to make sure the detail was perfect.

“I enjoy visual impact – the 'whaoo effect,' as they say,” says Sergio del Puerto of Serial Cut. “I love it when people spend time looking at an image, having fun within it and with its details. And also I like when they can't figure out how it was done, whether it's real or digital.” The Oreo Mini campaign fits squarely into that central conflict, blurring the line between reality and fabrication. By creating an entire scene of paper that stretches to each edge of the frame, the view is plunged into that aesthetic with no frame of reference. It’s unbalancing, but exciting. It highlights the playful nature, the cartoonish feeling that comes with eating a bite sized version of America’s Favorite Cookie.

Serial Cut is not constrained to any particular discipline, using paper cutting, found objects, sculpture, illustration, CGI. For Sergio and the team at Serial Cut, it’s not about loyalty to a process or technique, it’s about getting an image that elicits unexpected responses. “I never felt like an illustrator but an image-maker,” says Sergio. At the end of the day, everything is in service to the final product.